Ever heard someone say, “Tokyo has lacked master planning”?
That is a false statement or assumption.
A more apt aphorism is perhaps “Tokyo lacks master planning.” Meaning today.
According to Akira Koshizawa in Story of Tokyo City Planning, “The truth is that Tokyo has had urban planning. It is just that it was not implemented according to the original plan. And while subsequent generations have relied heavily on the results of each urban planning project, they have forgotten about them, failed to create new urban ‘assets’ (Koshizawa uses the term ‘stock’ but here the term ‘asset’ is used), and rather have devoured the legacy of those assets.” (p.13-14)
Not surprising for a country that had let its previous millennial capital wall notoriously fall to disrepair, instead conceding a city as ephemerons, coined by Henry D. Smith: “Similarly a place of mediation between man and nature… rooted in the indigenous sense of a continuum of man and nature, and was sustained by the informal mixing of settled and unsettled areas in the actual form of the medieval capital: no wall existed to provide either real or symbolic separation of man and nature. In the aesthetic of the urban aristocracy, an ambiguity of nature and artifice was highly prized.” So as urban ephemerons were inherently a part of the human-nature continuum, so too Tokyo manifests direct effects of denaturing, such as with fire and earthquake. In many ways, denaturing is necessary to metabolize a city. Yet in Tokyo, at every point of a denaturing event, there was a form of master planning that has gone unfulfilled or unrealized.
When a provincial, albeit powerful overlord that would later become the ruling shogun, was relocated to Edo (present day Tokyo) from his ancestral fief, it was probably unimaginable even to him that a tiny fishing village would become a sprawling city of millions. The nawabari or master planning as we understand today would begin in 1603. This was the beginning of an ever incomplete city. The spiraling form of the urban diagram was at once a defensive and magical tome, and this diagram will forever determine, dictate, and destine this city to take on a state of becoming as it continues to be.
Various denaturing processes have changed and metabolized the city in a jolting kind of way, a series of rude awakenings. Without going into details in this newsletter, the following are samplings of such events:
Of many fires that ravaged Edo, 1657 Great Fire of Meireki was the most severe. Almost 60% of the city turned to ashes and over 100,000 lives perished. The aftermath of this disaster was the introduction of fire protection zones. 1707 Hōei Eruption of Mt. Fuji, which eventually led to damaged crops and caused famine over large areas that took decades to recover. 1855 Ansei Earthquake shook the city and wider coastal regions, and tsunami damages were extensively recorded. After the 1868 Bloodless Surrender of Edo via Meiji restoration, the Fire of 1872 effectively allowed the new government to reconstruct Ginza as a symbol of Westernization by creating a city built of bricks, a new fireproof building material of the time.[1] Here too, the reconstruction efforts were limited to the Ginza area due to budgetary constraints.
As a part of the creation of a new capital city worthy of imperial grandeur, foreign consultants were invited. Invited in 1886, James Hobrecht was the Prussian director for urban planning renowned for his 1862 development plan for a million-sized Berlin, simply called the Hobrecht-Plan. Ultimately, in 1887, Wilhelm Böckmann and Hermann Ende were invited to plan a neoclassical city with grand avenues, but by then the project derailed for budgetary reasons, yet again, as well as due to a growing cultural backlash in Japan against mimicking Western architecture. One can witness a glimpse of this plan in the built Ministry of Justice, completed in 1895, based on their design and delineation (rendering). Their designs for an imperial parade ground with monumental colonnades were replaced in 1889 by an open lawn with pine trees, a Japanese symbolism of eternal rule and a lower-budget alternative.
Unbuilt Design for Japanese Parliament, 1880s, by the firm of Ende, Böckmann & Köhler
The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake was another potentially catalytic moment. The Imperial Revival Plan was approved by the cabinet in December 1923, a mere three months after the earthquake. Although marred in budget cuts and shrunken scope, it nonetheless left a legacy with the creation of vast parks large and small, a wide green belt of Showa Street, the nation’s first riverside “waterfront” park of Sumida Park, as well as fireproofed institutions. The end of the Second World War in 1945 paved the way for the “Basic Policy on War Reconstruction Plan,” but this plan too was obstructed by the GHQ’s “Dodge Line” policy that enacted austerity measures to reconstruct Japan.
Koshizawa would go on to lament: “Urban planning in modern Japan is characterized by a lack of understanding… about urban planning and urban reconstruction in times of peace, and a lack of financial resources that prevents plans from materializing. Unfortunately, urban planning has been implemented only during national events (such as the Olympics, the Universiade, and large-scale events like the World Expos), except in times of emergency (reconstruction from natural disasters, war-time industrial complex, and postwar reconstructions).”
The 18th Olympiad of 1964, the first in Tokyo and Asia, the 32nd Olympiad of 2020(21), and by extension the 1972 World Expo in Osaka and 2025 World Expo in Osaka, yet again, were supposed to be such event based catalysts. What did these events really leave behind? Is it predestined to follow the footsteps of the predecessors? The main essay to be published will further analyze the contemporary state of a master plan, if any.
Meanwhile, I venture to say, let us imagine that the original spiraling diagram of the city is exerting effects and affectations to the present. While budgets and illiteracy may from time to time appear to cause pauses and disruptions to whatever grandiose plans one may have for Tokyo, it may well be that embedded protocols from the deeply ingrained past will inevitably keep the city from ever achieving the kind of perfection, consistency, and thorough comprehension that those in power yearn for. In its stead, this city proffers a kind of decentralization for those outside of power structure to find, even create, distributed highly niched bubbles akin to otaku-like obsessional spheres of varying degrees of social reclusivity and promiscuity. As Hayao Kawai has aptly described in his masterpiece Hollow Center Structure in the Depth of Japan (Chuo Koronsha, 1982) “It is probably the archetype of the strong sense of love for the defeated... There is no principle that occupies the center; it can be thought of as circling around a hollow. In other words, the repetition of similar events with slight variations seems to be a structure that circles around the central ‘void’ and could never permanently reach the true center. ...It does not offer a model of consolidation by an authority or power, but rather a model in which a center with no power or action appropriately balances the opposing forces.”
Author: Kaz Yoneda, FRSA
Reader: Gregory Serweta, AIA
Editor: Hinako Izuhara
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Thank you for your time and kind attention.
Until next time!